Our Unending Tragedy: America’s Middle East Fiasco

March 21st, 2021 by Tom Lynch

Hubris is the one word that defines war to me. I’m reminded of that when I think of our experiences in the Middle East over the last nearly 30 years, and when I consider my own odyssey in Vietnam.

We’ve been in Afghanistan since invading the country on 7 October 2001. After 20 years, like the dog that caught the bus, we still have no idea what to do next, which is exactly what President Biden and his team are trying to figure out now.

In a superb piece for The New Yorker (8 March issue), Dexter Filkins makes a compelling case that after America leaves, the Taliban will once again command the country with Sharia law. Although the Trump administration went through the motions of trying to craft a power-sharing deal between Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani and the Taliban to let America save a bit of face as it leaves, a Talib leader Filkins met with said, “We’re not sharing power with anyone.” And he meant it.

I can’t help thinking that when we do pull our last troops from the country, Afghanistan will be in precisely the same position as it was before the twin towers came down. So much for $130 billion and 22,266 American casualties.

Yesterday, 20 March, was the 18th anniversary of America’s second invasion of Iraq. The war officially ended on 15 December 2011, but it wasn’t until three days later, on the 18th, that the last 500 troops left the country. During that nearly eight-year war, 4,497 Americans died in combat and more than 32,000 were wounded, wounds that echo resoundingly to this day.

In Iraq and Afghanistan we never figured out what to do next.

Just as in Vietnam.

In 2005, I wrote a column for the Boston Globe comparing the Iraq war to my own experiences in Vietnam. In memory of the Iraq anniversary, I want to share that column here. It’s as true now as it was then.

Where Have All The Soldiers Gone

Listening to all the arguments about the Iraq war is like being at a rappers’ convention; it’ll make your head spin. It reminds me of another national mistake, one that I was part of, 40 years ago.

I graduated from college in June 1967, without a care in the world, a thought in my head or a desire to find a job.

My grandfather, the retired chief of police for Haverhill, Massachusetts, population 65,000 or so, was chairman of the local draft board. He and my grandmother lived with us. Every Monday night someone would drive to our house, pick up Grampie and take him to the weekly meeting of the draft board where a group of older men would decide the fate of a group of younger men.

One night during dinner Grampie looked across the table and said, “Tommy, I can’t keep you out of this any longer. It doesn’t look right.” I hadn’t known that he was keeping me out of anything, and it took me a minute to figure out that he was talking about the draft.

My father, sitting at the head of the table, put down his fork, but didn’t say a word. During World War II, after slogging through Italy and France for three years, he’d been seriously wounded and left alone to die in an army field hospital corridor. He didn’t die, but it was eight months before he was well enough to be discharged for home. My dad knew war.

When my grandfather spoke of the draft, Dad immediately decided that what happened to him wasn’t about to happen to his first-born. So he and Grampie determined on the spot that I would become a card-carrying, uniform-wearing, quasi-killing machine in the Army Reserve: a weekend warrior. And the very next afternoon I found myself, along with the two of them, sitting on the porch of the Lawrence Army Reserve unit’s commanding officer, signing on for six years of weekly drills and two-week summer camps.

I started going to the drills with the other reservists. Every Monday night we’d march around the Reserve Center’s parking lot, a small sea of out-of-shape, overweight 20-somethings in olive drab, singing cadence and lusting for battle. Well, the simulated kind, anyway. “I want to be an airborne ranger.”

Today, members of the Army Reserve and National Guard are fighting courageously, many of them dying, in Iraq. More than 425,000 have been deployed. More than 95,000 have served two or more 18-month tours. Clearly, these men and women, as well as their families, are making large sacrifices every day.

But in the late 1960s, because of the draft, there were only two kinds of people in the Army Reserve. There were veterans of the Korean conflict, men who had been to war, but had decided to stay in the Reserves for the camaraderie, and, then, there were the rest of us, all college grads who knew the right people, or whose parents did, and had joined the Reserves to avoid Vietnam, and we’d march around playing silly soldier games to do it.

I did that for three months. Then a high school friend, Bobby Schena, came home in a coffin. Then another friend and then another, each in his individually wrapped, olive green shroud.

In Fenruary,1968, to the consternation of my father (“Have you lost your mind, Tom?”), the displeasure of my grandfather and the utter disbelief of my peers in the Army Reserve, I joined the regular Army to become a real airborne ranger, went to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, then Airborne, then Ranger, and in 1969 found myself, a newly minted second lieutenant, passing through Saigon and heading north. I was in a C-130 with a planeload of young soldiers who did not know the right people and had no idea of why they were there or what they were in for. Most were teenagers, lonely souls far from home. Regardless of who they were, all of them, all of us, eventually became somebody’s cannon fodder, and more than 50,000 of us didn’t make it out alive. Like my dad, we all learned to know war.

Now, nearly 40 years later, our country is in an awful, no-win position, maneuvered there by men with names like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Kristol, Feith and, of course, Bush. All of them did know the right people and either had deferments, lots of them, or, like the president, were weekenders. Although it appears to have been fine for weekenders of Mr. Bush’s social and political status to skip those tiresome drills if they proved inconvenient.

What these “neocons” know of war they got from a board game. In their clueless imperialism they have managed to move their game pieces, us, to the brink of an obscene disaster, an American and global tragedy.

A lifetime spent walking war’s sanitized sidelines, never hearing that unforgettable, but very special, sound a bullet makes as it whizzes past your ear, prevents one from appreciating the chaotic hell of war and from grasping how terrifying it really ought to be to rip men and women from the fabric of their families to face the horrifying prospect of fighting and dying in a strange land for a counterfeit cause.

This new national nightmare is certainly sad, but what is sadder still is that nobody, not I, not you and, least of all, not the egotists that tossed us into this deepest of pits, has any idea of how to get us out without causing even more harm than we already have. Posterity will be tripping over America’s arrogance for a long time to come.

In the pantheon of man-made catastrophes, this has been a monumental achievement.

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